SS&C Hubwise SIPP update 20/10/22

Good afternoon,

Since my last update, I wanted to share with you some of the key activity that we have been working on and the progress that we have made. There have been some challenges, particularly in relation to processes dependant on the data migrated from Hartley, but as we work through these, we continue to improve. 

There are key topics that I know are of interest to you and so I will step through them and explain where we are currently. 

Contribution and tax relief reconciliation

• We have now completed a reconciliation of all contributions and tax relief claims for the entire 2021 – 2022 tax year. As I am sure you will appreciate, this was a significant but necessary task and allowed us to submit a tax reclaim for missing payments as part of the HMRC annual sweep.

• We are currently working on the reconciliation of contributions and tax reclaim payments from 6 April 2022 until we took over the accounts. We are working in reverse order for this task to capture any reclaims that can still be submitted as part of the standard HMRC process (3 month window from the date of receipt of the contribution). Any remaining tax reclaims that need to be submitted will be included in next year’s HMRC annual sweep. However, SS&C Hubwise will prefund these values to lessen the impact to clients.

• We expect to receive our first tax reclaim payment from HMRC on 22 October 2022 and payments will be applied to accounts within 24 hours. Please note that the standard tax reclaim process typically takes 8 – 10 weeks from the date that the contribution is received.

• As expected, we have received many Freshdesk tickets in relation to tax reclaim payments. The team are working hard on this task, and we would kindly ask for your continued patience while we complete the full reconciliation. Once fully complete, we will issue a report of the impacted accounts for each scenario. We will then ask that you review the tickets raised and if satisfied that they have been resolved, set them to closed. This will ensure that our focus is on the required areas.

Residual cash balance reconciliation

• It has taken significantly longer than ever expected to receive the remaining cash balances from Hartley however, payment was finally received on 13 October 2022.

• The majority of accounts have been credited and we continue to work through the remaining payments.

• Frustratingly, we did not receive the payment breakdown file from Hartley, but rather than have clients wait any longer, we are manually reconciling the payments. We expect this to be complete by week commencing 17 October.

Transaction Narratives

• We are aware that the narratives for contributions, tax relief and interest payments are incorrect in some cases, showing the generic “top up” description. We intend to carry out an exercise to correct these after the reconciliation exercise has been completed.

Profit and Loss and Complaints

• We are currently in discussion with the Administrators at Hartley around how these will be resolved. We will provide a further update in due course.

Payroll process and income payments

• We have completed several payroll events and with each one we have strengthened our controls and further stabilised the process.

• A number of payments were missed from the first few payroll runs as a result of incomplete records migrated to us from Hartley. Once identified, they have been added to the payroll file and subsequent payments have been successful.

• The volume of queries in relation to payroll is already significantly less than we were receiving prior to the migration, a good indication that the process has improved overall.

• We have received a small number of queries in relation to unexpected tax deductions from income payments. Our investigations have highlighted that in some instances, Hartley have processed payments without tax in error. Any such cases are being detailed in Freshdesk tickets.

• Payslips are currently issued to investors by post, with future plans to have these uploaded. These documents will read slightly different to those that were issued by Hartley in that we only detail taxable payments.

Illustration issues and fixes

• Illustrations are a key focus of our upcoming delivery plan. There are two areas to be addressed:

  • the online journey for all illustration scenarios (e.g., drawdown)

  • the fixes required for issues identified with the existing documents

• We currently have a temporary process in place for requesting illustrations that cannot be produced in the portal. These should be raised by Freshdesk ticket, and we would ask for your continued patience as we are currently outside of our SLA but working through all requests in date order.

• We will share the 3 month plan for these delivery items with you within the coming week.

Crystallised/non crystallised values

• The crystallised/non crystallised values in the portal may be incorrect in some cases. This is due to the unreconciled transaction data that was migrated to us. Once the reconciliation tasks are complete, these values will be correct.

Document uploads

• You may have received requests from us via Freshdesk asking that you assist with sharing documents with your investors, such as welcome packs and transfer acceptance letters.

• Such communications were previously posted by Hartley to investors. We appreciate the additional workload that this is causing for both partner firms and our operational teams and so it is our intention to have these included within our automated upload process to the document library section of the portal.

• In the meantime, we appreciate your assistance with ensuring these letters are shared and confirming that this has been actioned.

Freshdesk and queries

• With any period of change there is an expected spike in contacts and SIPP queries account for a significant portion of the total tickets being raised.

• Our teams are working tirelessly to respond to and resolve as many of these as possible and we will shortly be making an announcement in relation to Customer Service and work we are close to completing that will further help.

• There are some that we will not be able to resolve until certain tasks have been completed or data received. In these cases, we will advise in the ticket, and we thank you for your patience

• We apologise if we have failed to acknowledge any tickets within our usual timeframes, please be assured that these have been assigned to the correct teams and are being worked through in date and priority order.

• In order to help manage the volume of open tickets, we would ask that you continue to close any tickets that you are satisfied have been resolved and require no further action by us.

Should you have any questions then please click the “Contact Customer Services” button below.

Kind Regards

Douglas Boyce

Managing Director