My 95 year old mom lost a certificate for shares of stock held by Shareowner Online. We notified them and they sent a letter saying we needed to complete a surety bond with them to cover the lost certificate and transfer the shares into direct deposit. The cost is 5% of the value of the shares. The alternative was to get a surety bond by an "A" insurer and submit it to them.Found out that going directly to the insurer is 1/2 the cost of getting the surety bond through Shareowner Online, so elected to go that route. I am using the same insurer they use. The agent asked for me to get a pre-approval on the surety bond from Shareowner Online before processing it, so I reached out to Shareowner Online to see how this could be done. Well, they don't take faxes, everything has to be by mail. You can also not speak to anyone directly in the lost certificate department. You get send to an Indian call center and they know absolutely nothing. Even when you insist on speaking to a supervisor who does speak English, he is useless. Informs me it must be mailed in and they will mail back a response. The process literaly took a month for them to get back to me to provide feedback on finalizing the surety bond to their absolute specifications. At several points, I tried emailing them to ask when they would get back to me and simply received a stock reply email response that ignored my question and told me that they understood that I had lost my certificate and then went through the steps to change them into direct registration by getting a surety bond. There wasn't even an attempt to addresss the question that I asked that I had sent in a draft of a surety bond and when they would provide feedback on it so I could finalize it.I have now sent in the pre-approved Surety bond that has been finalized with tracking. They received it 2 weeks ago per my tracking and there has been no update in my account that they have received it and are processing it and when the shares will be put into direct registration. Is that really that hard to provide. I get emails from Amazon, when I purchase something, when it has left the warehouse and when it will be arriving at my doore and then when it has been delivered.The snail pace of response, the lack of reponding to simple questions with answers that show you at least read the question put forth, the inability to answer questions over the phone.I work with dozens of financial companies, Schwab, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, etc. No one, and I mean no one is as un-customer service helpful as Shareowner Online. I just don't get the complete unprofessionalism of this company. If you have shares being held by them, get them out. Get them into Schwab or a broker as soon as you can. This company is the worst and should really not be in business and I am going to write the stock company we have shares in and let them know of my experience as well.
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