A couple thought they had struck it lucky after a banking blunder saw £11m appear in their investment accounts. Richard Warnock and his wife Jacqueline have each had accounts with investment giant Abrdn for the past five years.
Builder Richard was stunned to find £8.3m in his account and his wife had £2.5m when they woke on Wednesday. Richard said: “For a couple of hours there, I thought this might be real and we’d hit the jackpot! It was like winning the EuroMillions!
“My heart was racing when I saw the cash. We had already started thinking about how we would spend it,” reports the Daily Record. “At first I did think it must have been a mistake – but my wife Jacqui said her portfolio was up too. We started thinking one of our company investments had gone through the roof overnight as is the nature with the stock market and this could be genuine.”
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Both Richard and Jacqueline have self-invested private pensions and Stocks and Shares ISAs with Abrdn. Richard initially doubted the huge sum but was convinced it was genuine when his balance remained the same several hours later. A businessman contacted his financial advisor to cash in his profits, but was left disappointed after it was discovered that an IT error had caused his funds to soar.
The pair were told that a decimal point had been incorrectly placed on stock. He explained: “I contacted my financial advisor because we wanted to cash in the profits but I couldn’t get through on the phone. When we found out that there had been a mistake, my heart just sank. I’d really gotten my hopes up!”
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“We make aggressive investments that come with high risk. Somedays it can go up or down by £10,000. It didn’t seem impossible to get such a big return on our investment. We are gutted.”
He added: “We still don’t know how it all really happened. Abrdn haven’t been in contact. We were told about the error through our financial advisor. I’m sure we are not the only ones out there who thought we were millionaires for a couple of hours.”
An amendment was later issued to the two accounts and they went back to a value of around £500,000. An Abrdn spokesperson said: “There was an error in the intra-day fund price data feed we receive from a third party. This related to a small number of funds from one external fund manager. The result was that an error appeared on our system for a short period of time on Wednesday 20 March.”
“The issue lay with the company who supply share price data to platforms across the market, including abrdn. Our BAU processes identified the error which was then raised with the third-party provider who fixed the issue. Values are now showing correctly on our systems. There has been no impact on any customer holdings. We regret any problems this may have caused for the Financial Advisers who use our platform and their clients.
“Abrdn is an adviser facing platform and therefore it is right and proper that our interactions on issues such as this would be with the adviser not the customer.”
