The most wretched customer treatment

Some time ago I mentioned some horrible treament of a customer. It is from a well known USA financial institution.

Now that this institution has apparently reformed themselves and the issue is taken care of, we will name the company:

Fidelity Investments!

Now you might wonder why my wrath is set against Fidelity... You see for years I sought to get Fidelity to do something that every CS person agreed was reasonable: Send me a statement of my 401K account! Yes they would and did send on demand but never ever would they set it up to be sent automatically because you see Fidelity only "record keeps" for Multinational Hi-Tech where I work. MHT you see set statements up to be "delivered electronically." It never was delivered though. The victim was/is supposed to go and get it, download it, and print it using victim's own resources. Fidelity had the perfect excuse: MHT terms "do not permit" automatic mailing of a statement. Not monthly, not quarterly, not annually, not at all!!! Fighting MHT is worse than fighting City Hall: Whoever might be responsible cannot be found and will not answer. Said party was probably outsourced a couple of years ago. Thus the regular and expensive dialogue continued so this victim could track what might be in the account.

On one occasion I accused Fidelity of acting like Enron. "How could that be?" asked the CS? Simple! You withhold financial data. The only possible reason is you are trying to hide something! This practice is a violation of the SIA Investor's Bill of Rights -- http://www.sia.com/best_practices/html/investor_rights.html -- one of which is that "As an investor, you have the right: ... To accurate and timely regular statements of your account, including detailed transactional information." Month after month, one or more Fidelity reps would courteously empathize with me and then refuse to set the computer to send a regular statement.

Now we will tell about what happened in 2006. A little thing called the Pension Protection Act! http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060817.html

There we find "Ensures that workers have more information about the performance of their accounts." We understand that the underlying law requires quarterly statements.

Now, thanks to this Act of Congress, the victim can elect to Reject Electronic Delivery and Fidelity will send a quarterly statement.

Wow is this not something! Finally I get my statement 4 times a year. It only took an Act of Congress to make it happen.

Does the blame lie with Fidelity or MHT? Probably both, but since Fidelity handles the money and the accounting, you would think they would never get put in a spot of refusing regular statements. As I reminded them on several occasions, "You are the bank. You have the money, all of it. I own the account, all of it. That makes you the vendor and me the customer! How dare you refuse to send a regular statement like you do for any customer walking in the door with a little money to invest?"

Since they did behave in this manner, my decision is settled: The minute I am no longer forced to use Fidelity is the minute I take every dime to an institution where I will be treated like a customer!