PTSB transfers to Raisin & Trade Republic "lost"

Thanks for your advice Sunny.

PTSB are going to ring me again tomorrow. I will ask PTSB then what the GDPR issue is that is stopping Citi Ireland sorting the issue with Citi Frankfurt.

Yes, the money seems to be sitting on a suspense account at Citi Frankfurt and not applied to the Trade Republic account nor returned to my PTSB account.

Good point that Citi Frankfurt should have returned the money straight away if they can't apply it.

Agreed that something weird is going on. (Maybe an IT issue? or a mistake?)

PTSB have been good to me over the last 24 hours they seem to be trying their best to fix this but I will absolutely go to the CBI and make a complaint against PTSB as the responsible sending bank if this issue is not fixed soon.
 
I was assuming Trade Republic are doing some periodic sweep of those virtual Citi IBAN accounts, rather than Citi applying the lodgement to another TR account. (Guessing here - no idea what they're really doing)

If the payment has been handled correctly by both PTSB and Citi - then there might be restrictions on how they can reverse it - e.g. perhaps from Citi's point of view those funds are now owned by TR.
 
Yes, I want the money to go to TR. God knows how money gets from Citi Frankfurt to Trade Republic (sweep or lodgements to a TR account).
 
I searched Reddit to see if anyone has the same TR issue as me. (I should have done that sooner!).

I found 3 posts from people with the exact same TR issue as me. 1 of the 3 posters has said that the money was eventually applied.

This Reddit post (translated) is near identical to my issue.

"On 10/03/2023 I made an immediate transfer through my Moey account! to Trade Republic to benefit from 4% interest on uninvested capital. It's not the first time I've done this and I've never had any problems. However, today's date and even though the money has left my account (I have proof of transfer) the amount has not yet been received by the broker. I already spoke to Moey! and they tell me that the transfer was made and that the problem is possibly due to the recipient. Speaking with Trade Republic, they say they will hand the case over to the competent department and wait, but so far nothing. Has anything similar happened to anyone? Should I be worried and ask for the money back through my bank? Thanks"

All the posts seem to be about an issue that occurred on 3 October 2023 (or maybe 4 October 2023). Something has clearly gone seriously wrong at Citi Frankfurt or at Trade Republic around this date.

All posters report frustrations with dealing with Trade Republic support on this.

My issue is clearly not an isolated issue but rather a systemic issue on the Citi or Trade Republic side.
 
Great research Serena

Who is Trade Republic?

Their website gave me a headache looking at it.

Can you report them to anyone?

Brendan
 
Brendan Burgess said:
Who is Trade Republic?
Click to expand...

Trade Republic - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Trade Republic: Invest in stocks, bonds & ETFs

Do more with your money: the easiest way to save in stocks, ETFs, bonds and more.
traderepublic.com

2023-10-17 21 12 06.png
 
Brendan Burgess said:
Great research Serena

Who is Trade Republic?

Their website gave me a headache looking at it.

Can you report them to anyone?

Brendan
Click to expand...

Trade Republic are a broker in Germany.

I can report Trade Republic to the German regulator. BaFIN.

I guess I can report Trade Republic to the CBI too as they are a deposit taker in the state with serious conduct issues. Thoughts welcome.

I can also report PTSB as the "responsible party" because they were the sender bank and it never reached the beneficiary. PTSB are working with me on this so I would rather not do this yet.

I will hold off until Friday before I lodge 2/3 seperate complaints with the regulators if this is not resolved by then.
 
SerenaZ said:
I can report Trade Republic to the German regulator. BaFIN.

I can also report PTSB as the "responsible party" because they were the sender bank and it never reached the beneficiary.
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It actually sounds like Citi are the party at fault here.

PTSB sent your funds correctly.
TR seemingly weren't notified that your funds had arrived.

TR's money is held in escrow accounts with Citi which TR aren't allowed to touch - Citi is technically the beneficiary of the funds.

Hope this gets sorted quickly for you.
 
Thanks. Highly plausible that Citi are the party at fault. Plausible that part of a batch failed to run from Citi to TR. It is outrageous how long this is taking Citi to fix this if that is the case.

I guess there is no way for me to directly contact Citi? I can only go via PTSB and via TR?

Who regulates Citi Frankfurt? Is it the German regulator? Or do Citi Ireland/Europe do the back office processing and thus are regulated by the CBI?
 
Trade Republic hold a trust account in Citi that holds all their customers money. That's where your money should go. Trade Republic give virtual IBANs that relate to clearing accounts that trade republic set up for individual customer record keeping and can account for the the money in the trust account. They are not physical bank accounts.
Unless you are trading, your money never leaves the trust account. Trade Republic only ever touches the money in the trust account to settle trading transactions on the back of a trust agreement that every customer signs up for.
If I would hazard a guess, I would assume your money had hit the pooled trust account but there is an issue with the virtual IBAN and allocating it your individual 'clearing account' which is an issue for trade republic. Either that or for some reason the virtal IBAN isn't mapping correctly to the main trust account and that's why it is sitting in a citi suspense account but if that's the case citi should return the money.

To be honest, trade republic aren't a bank. They a broker. These accounts are set up to be trading accounts. When trade republic opened this to everyone to just lodge money and not trade, I would question their ability to cope with the volume and manage if things go wrong as they always do at some stage.
 
I came across this statement somewhere (I can’t remember where) stating :

“when you make cross-border IBAN transfers, the characters that make up your IBAN number are run through the payments system used by your Bank. By verifying the numbers and letters against their database, the system is able to confirm the sender’s account and that of the recipient”. Taking this into consideration, how then do funds still get “lost”? Surely every transaction must have a unique code identifier?
 
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@Sunny - Thanks for the explanation that Trade Republic rather than Citi might be the party at-fault.

I have contacted 2 other affected Trade Republic customers via Reddit. Neither have heard anything of any substance from Trade Republic support. Both are saying that support has stopped replying with any substance on this issue. The same is happening with me. It is deeply concerning that Trade Republic are saying nothing on this. Both are trying recalls but neither have had success with a recall thus far.

Trade Republic Support is an absolute disgrace with this issue.

Trade Republic Complaints department have replied to no emails with the exception of a reference number.

I suspect Trade Republic are snowed under with issues after they launched their 4% savings account and can't cope.

Today I logged a complaint with BaFin against Trade Republic. I complained about the issue in hand, I complained about their support level and raised concerns that they might have an IT issue or a control issue around how they manage payments.

Meanwhile, the sender bank, PTSB, who are legally the responsible party, even if they are not the at-fault party, failed to provide me with a promised update today thus far with how they are getting on with getting Citi Ireland to engage with Citi Frankfurt on this.
 
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I too am having issues with a deposit to Trade Republic, I sent the payment last week and it has still not arrived and Trade Republic so far have mentioned nothing about any issues on their end.
 
cotty34 said:
I too am having issues with a deposit to Trade Republic, I sent the payment last week and it has still not arrived and Trade Republic so far have mentioned nothing about any issues on their end.
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Join the club. Sorry to hear that. Interesting that the issue is therefore not restricted to one day if you had the issue last week.

What are you going to do to address?
- Suggest you email BaFin on this. The more people who complain the better. It would help us all if you did this.
- Probably best if you report it to your sending bank but a trace will probably just lead to Citi Frankfurt and recalls don't seem to work.
 
SerenaZ said:
Join the club. Sorry to hear that. Interesting that the issue is therefore not restricted to one day if you had the issue last week.

What are you going to do to address?
- Suggest you email BaFin on this. The more people who complain the better. It would help us all if you did this.
- Probably best if you report it to your sending bank but a trace will probably just lead to Citi Frankfurt and recalls don't seem to work.
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Thanks a lot, I'll email BaFin now and I will ring my bank in the morning as when I contacted them earlier today they said it might be held for "security checks" and they were going to do a trace on it. I'll mention this is a known issue now and ask for a recall if possible.
 
cotty34 said:
Thanks a lot, I'll email BaFin now and I will ring my bank in the morning as when I contacted them earlier today they said it might be held for "security checks" and they were going to do a trace on it. I'll mention this is a known issue now and ask for a recall if possible.
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Thanks for contacting BaFin.

"Security checks" means Compliance checks. My payment was not stuck with Compliance. I bet the same for you.

A recall is unlikely to work based on other peoples experience.
 
Cooler_box said:
“when you make cross-border IBAN transfers, the characters that make up your IBAN number are run through the payments system used by your Bank. By verifying the numbers and letters against their database, the system is able to confirm the sender’s account and that of the recipient”. Taking this into consideration, how then do funds still get “lost”? Surely every transaction must have a unique code identifier?
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This sweeping statement seems a little misleading. The originating bank can check that the IBAN is in a valid format and has a valid check digit and a valid destination bank identifier. But there's no way for the sending bank to confirm that the IBAN is allocated to the correct recipient, or that it even exists; a bank cannot lookup account holder details for another bank.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
Wow!

Which bank did you transfer the money from?

And had you done similar transfers in the past from the same bank to the same account in Trade Republic?

Brendan
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Bank of Ireland, and yes I had done two previous transactions that were both successful and arrived within the time frame I'd expect (<24 hours). Here's the mad part; I had scheduled another (4th) payment for the day after the missing payment (3rd) which arrived as normal but the 3rd remains missing.

Very puzzling altogether and leaves me with no confidence in Trade Republic, even when I last got a reply from them today they didn't mention that there might be an issue on their end.
 
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