Personal

My wife has 2 Super accounts with CFS, one in her married name and one in her maiden name. Attempts to have both accounts combined into her married name have been nothing short of horrendous. When told it had been done we found out that it hadn't been. There are always excuses that the signatures on file don't match, which is not strange given the signatures are 15 years old. Then there are always other excuses as to why requested things haven't been done. Don't even consider trying to draw part funds from managed accounts - lost paper-work or a myriad of excuses to delay things. We would not and could not recommend CFS to anyone.

Only few hours on the day of inspection for the property, I call to make sure the property is still available. The inspection is confirmed and ongoing. While waiting for a while and nobody show up I call to find out what is going on. The answer from the receptionist :"Sorry the property is rented out!" . I took the day off from work for that inspection and receive only wet shoos!

I phoned two months ago to consolidate my accounts and made changes to some covered I had. Guess what, two months later, when I checked my online account, nothing was changed, NOTHING! I called again to inquiry, I got transferred twice, and the last person said "oh absolutely, we can see you contacted us two months ago, we will have a look into our phone record..." Me: "Oh ok, how long does it take?" The person answered "48-72 hours." Are you asking me to wait 3 more days for you to check your recordings? You know what, I bet I would not get any answer and then asked to wait again while you keep charging me fees from both of my Colonial accounts which should be consolidated months ago!

Terrible company, I recommend to your enemies.

Myself and my wife invested $25,000 with Colonial First State ten years ago. Within two weeks it had reduced to $17,000. We tried to withdrawal our funds but the fund was frozen/locked allowing 10% max. withdrawals a few times per year. It has taken us TEN YEARS to recoup our money. All told we lost approx $12,000!!!

Not recommended

A substantial loss of value from my super value since mid August, 2018 to 23.12.18 is disgracefull for a Balanced Fund. I would not recommended them.

I took my money from MLC wrap that made good money, having been convinced by Commonwealth to move to Colonial First State.
Result, MLC Wrap made good percentages growth, CFS less than half of MLC.
I had 4 financial advisers in 30 months.
In that same time frame Not one share was moved, touched, changed..
I paid full fees, until I sacked their so called service calls.

From 2007-2015 my superfund was Colonial First State. I would always check my balance to see if it was growing, but it never did. It would actually decrease. Money would continue to go there, but I would never see the amount grow. In 2015 I decided to switch to Australian Super and now my superfund grows $15-20k per year!!!

Colonial First State are criminals and need to be taken to COURT. How is this legal?. How can they get away with this?? Im extremely unsatisfied and upset they have taken money away from my future.

Took my fees annually for managing my 250K funds over 15 years but in the end sent me a letter to apologize as wait for it... nobody from Colonial First State was actually overlooking or managing my fund. It had been in limbo all this time. And the balance is 5K less. Refund of $1700 for all the trouble with an apology was all I got.

Please note CBA introduced me to this fund at the outset with effusive praise and recommendation. Crooks looking after crooks?

I Invested $3000 over a 1 year period. After the 1 year my balance was $2830. I called up to cancel my account and instead of the staff member performing my transaction SHE STARTED BELITTLING ME..... after 28 minutes of trying the transaction was performed. I asked to speak to the supervisor who agreed that it was not good enough and that the transaction was done..

Next day I called in and asked the final price I would be receiving... and I was told $2720!!! and I rang in again and complained.. they said $2720 had been done..

The following day I got my bank credit and I got $2666.....!!!

These guys are absolute scum, amateur teenage phone operators, rude and clueless on the phone..

I am currently writing to the Financial Ombudsman to make an official complaint..

THERE ARE 39393903 others out there... DO NOT DEAL WITH THESE GUYS>>>> The only thing they are good at ( or on time with ) is taking their FEES OUT...

DONT DO IT TO YOURSELF!!!!

unfortunately i join thousands who have been subjected to thousands of dollars per year in fees and a return of negative 2.8%.. I'm sure i read an article recently that stated CFS was supposed to roll over high fee accounts to low fee's as a result of the royal banking enquiry.. it would be interesting to find out what happened, however I won't be hanging around to ask!

Just got my statement and lost over $2000 compared to the previous 6 months. Clearly the muppets who run this fund don't know what they're doing and just out of Uni.. I am part of the Class action against this fund and hope that plays out well for me to get something back from these thieves.

CBA sent me to CFS, two years later CFS had lost over 30% and refused to rollover remnant funds for years to my new SMF. Now I have an offer for compensation that has not moved in nearly a year. No sign of ethical behavior from advice, management, returns, access to funds, compensation, etc. "A very bad performer with very poor or negative returns, withheld access to funds unduly, and negligible customer service". Bye bye retirement money before you retire and probably after you die. Never again.

Currently paying $800/month in "fees" and yet I hear nothing from this mob for anywhere up to 12 months unless I ask them what they are doing. They offer nothing you can't do yourself - best to walk away

I lost over $1,000.00 in 6 months how the hell does that work.
Wasn’t my choice of super but will def be rolling over.
FYI They aren’t even in the top 10 of super performers.
Is it that Comm Bank have offloaded CSF was performing marginally till then.

Someone I know was here on a work visa; his visa has since been cancelled and he's been living out of Australia for a couple of years now; but this company still haven't given him his Super; totally inefficient and haven't got a clue how to return your money when it's time to do so :(

The reason CFS call centre is back or the reason the whole client operations department is bad is:
1- There is no internal collaboration between them
2- The call centre hates the admin department and vise versa.
3- Really really really bad management. The managers of the call centre create all this metrics they call KPI as a measure of performance so they can measure themselves and qualify for a bonus at the end of the year. Now the problem with these metrics is that is not customer focused. What I mean by that is that it doesn't benefit the customer in anyway, all it creates is preasure on the custmer service representatives (employees) to try adhere to those rules. For example one of the KPI is call flow. If an employee doesn't follow the call flow he can get performance managed and eventually get fired. So the focus for the ca centre representative is to try and hit those KPIs so that he doesn't get fired - forget about what the client needs. The model there is, presure the customer service representatives to meet their KPIs which has nothing to do with helping the client, therefore management looks good in the eyes of uper management and they all the a good chucky bonus at the end of the year. Stuff the client. AHT, call flow, Survey are the focus. They have forgotten that clients are the blood of that business, if you all pull out your money from CFS. Guess what happens, CFS goes BUST thanks to the poor customer service.

I've been with them for about 2 years. Had the money been placed into a bank account, there would have been twice the amount. Its incredible how terribly managed this fund is. I empathize with those who have got to stick with them until their loss is recovered - who knows how long that will take. I've basically cut my losses and rolled them over into another fund. Avoid them if possible.

With them for nearly 8 years and the online system has always been really basic with very little features. No app, difficult to manage anything. Their statements are sometimes very slow to come out and sometimes had many issues trying to log into their system. Would not recommend if you are someone who likes to manage their own super online rather than calling someone.

My very kind aunt invested $5000 for me back in 2008, my current balance is $3500. Yes this investment was made pre-GFC but it has not recovered whilst the markets largely have.

These guys have sat on my investment like lazy buggers, doing absolutely crap all with their thumbs up their butts like the numpties they are.

I could have invested this money myself back in 2009 when Domino's shares were like $4-$5 and literally duodecuple-d my money August last year when their shares peaked at about $70.

These nongs have no clue, I will be withdrawing my money and parking it in my own investments (ETFs and shares).

Crappy no-knowledge mouth-breathing noobs.

My mother had units in the fund which was successively called
Colonial Mutual Australian Property Fund,Colonial Retail Property Trust, Colonial First State Retail Property Trust,before it was terminated.
These units were bought at a fixed price from the fund,when the fund made offerings of new units,so presumably for that reason the documentation issued to
individual purchasers acknowledge only the numbers of units issued,
but not the price.So I've tried to find out the issue prices from Colonial First State. They have been amazingly unhelpful. There have been dozens of emails, eg
the fund "does not belong to our company" (well, true - it doesn't exist any more)
"the fund in question was not one of ours" (but they won't say which part of the Colonial organisation the fund was part of)"Colonial First State Property Limited is now trading as xxx"(xxx - can't help - I have indication of whether they should
be able to)"Colonial First State Retail Property may have been acquired
by yyy" (in fact yyy was soon taken over by Colonial First State
Global Asset Management)

Then I started getting emails from (apparently) Colonial Mutual,after some irrelevant or wrong replies, they directed me back to Colonial First State!.

In short these people have no compunction about making random
suggestions about who to contact, which does nothing but waste my time.
They won't just go and find out which part of the Colonial Mutual /Colonial First State organization is relevant.

This organisation is apparently in the business of handling people superannuation money.
It seems unbelievable that people can entrust them with their money and get this sort of run-around when they try to contact them 25 years later.