Account dealing

Payment of proceeds depend on two timescales.

1. The settlement period required by the fund provider or market – this can be between three and six days
2. BACS timescales which take three to four working days.

Payment to the client can therefore be between six and ten working days from the date the instruction is placed.

If a client is withdrawing a specific sum, any sale of a particular fund greater than 90% will convert to a unit-based deal for the whole transaction (the reasons for this 90% tolerance level are given in the answer to the question below). Once 90% is exceeded, you will need to submit the whole instruction as a unit-based sale (using the ‘quantity method’ which will allow you to specify units). It won’t therefore be possible to raise an exact amount. The system will present you with a warning message asking you to do this.

Your other options are as follows:

• Proportional sell: where it is unlikely that 90% will be exceeded for any fund
• Consideration based sell: where the amount is less than 90%.

The reason for implementing a tolerance is to avoid deal failures where assets drop in value. For example, if a client has £1,000 in a fund and requests a sell deal of £950 (95%) and the price drops so their holding is only worth £940, then the deal cannot be executed. This is a common approach across platforms.

The tolerance is set at 90% so it is still effective in periods of extreme market volatility. It’s still possible to achieve a sell of between 90% and a 100% of the value of an asset, it just needs to be done on a unit basis. This will of course mean the client won’t know the exact amount realised until after the relevant pricing point.

For trust accounts, you can place the sell instruction online and print out a paper form for all the trustees to sign. We will carry out the instruction when we have received the form. We can make the payment to any of the trustees or to the trust bank account. In some cases, we may need to see identification verification documents. We plan to offer an online withdrawal service in the future.

For company investments the process is similar to the above, although two authorised signatories need to sign and we will only make payment to the company’s bank account.

Yes, we do provide this facility. The easiest way for clients to do this is online at fidelity.co.uk (registration and log-in is required).

You can find out more about getting clients online here.