Duplicate transactions | Page 2 | Oaken Financial | Discussion forum

Loonie: Indeed, we all must make sure to verify every detail on documentation. There are often slips, with any financial institution.

Fixing them is quicker when one is in the office.
RetirEd

@dsc, chances are even you provided TNG transactions, Oaken will play the blame game by finding frivolous imperfections in the transaction and continue demand further information from you. You really need to toughen up! Oaken, as the EFT initiator, already has all the information.

No luck on resolving my missing money yet, but I did get a sympathetic CSR who took a bit more time to talk to me about what went wrong.

Oaken did a "software upgrade" on the first banking day of the new year that must have been designed by the team that previously worked for Rogers telecom. Same results ensued, and between January 4 and January 8 the payments transfer system at Oaken was not functional.

They prioritized fixing the transfer system first, and then sorting out the messes that occurred with people's money between January 4 and January 8 later. The claim is that the final system wide problems will be cleaned up by Monday, January 16, and that any money that has gone astray after that time will be addressed through an individual investigation process.

I'm hoping my money will show up at either Oaken or Hubert on Monday, and if not, I'll be launching one of those individual investigations. I wonder how many people are going to be waiting weeks, and perhaps months, longer to get reacquainted with their money?

Loonie said
I was not affected so I have no personal stake in this, but they owe you guys serious compensation.
Making your money disappear for days, weeks, maybe longer,
is totally unacceptable, very stressful, creates additional financial burdens, and is entirely their fault.
They are being nice to you on the phone because the bank is scared stiff that you may sue them - and win.  

I agree that it is not a great experience to have one's savings disappear for weeks, or longer, when they are supposedly in the custody of a federally regulated financial institution. I've lived in Canada for 39 years now, and never had a penny disappear like this in any bank or credit union.

But as for compensation, or recourse through the courts, I've seen enough corporate legal disputes to know that suing a bank is not as easy as it might appear on tv. It would definitely cost more in up front legal fees than the $50,000 that's gone missing in my case, so there would need to be a class action by all the depositors whose funds disappeared in the Oaken transfer snafu. And maybe it will come to that, if they cannot account for the money that got scrambled when their electronic funds transfer software blew up on January 4.

But I am hoping that Oaken will be able to recover the funds next week, and then they will sit in a stable account until my GICs mature. I don't think we are dealing with an FTX level of malfeasance here, but time will tell!

Loonie said
Yes, I know legal stuff is expensive and takes forever; and we don't iknow how big the "class" is. But people shouldn't just sit there politely waiting for their money back either.
There needs to be consequences for Oaken so that this sort of thing doesn't become acceptable.  

TD used to give customers $5 if they wait in line for a teller for too long

I agree, Rail Baron, nice to see another person using the polite way. My dealings with Oaken over the years have been just fine, they are very fair in terms of warning about rate changes and resetting rates for GICs purchased just before a rate increase, I'm betting if you work with them co-operatively you'll be made whole as you describe in your last paragraph.

A day late*, but not a dollar short, Oaken seems to have found my $50,000 and opened another 1 year GIC, backdated to the Dec. date that I'd originally purchased this certificate.

They still show the original GIC that was opened the same day in December with a zero balance. This suggests that once they found my funds, they were unable to put them back in the account that had briefly held them during the transfer software failure.

It may have been easier for them to create a brand new GIC, and perhaps eventually the empty one will drop out of my accounts? Or maybe they will eventually move the funds from the new GIC to the original GIC?

*I had been told last week that all the problems from the Jan 4 - 8 funds transfer software meltdown were scheduled to be cleared up by Jan. 16. But there was no sign of my money until Jan. 17 in Oaken Digital.

I don't plan to put any more funds into Oaken this year, and am slowly moving my money in my savings accounts away now. I'll never do more than one transaction at a time, and since I have accounts with both Home Bank and Home Trust, I'm moving the money from one first, and then moving the next one only after it settles.

It's been a wild ride over the past couple of weeks - not something I ever expected to happen with a Canadian bank. But it did get resolved.