What You Have to Know
- The ultimate transition of TD Ameritrade accounts to Schwab was broadly profitable however not with out hiccups.
- RIAs complained of undertrained name heart staff and lengthy wait instances.
- Schwab helps corporations navigate the modifications, Tom Bradley mentioned.
Mark Wolter’s shopper, newly recognized with Stage 3 lung most cancers, wanted cash to pay his payments. However, after the transition of TD Ameritrade accounts to the Schwab custodial platform over Labor Day weekend, a long-standing authorization to switch funds from his retirement account to his checking account was not in place.
“Swiftly,” after the conversion, “they’re like, ‘you don’t have the right authorizations to switch funds for this shopper,’” mentioned Wolter, a associate at RIA agency Beacon Wealth Advisors in McHenry, Illinois. “Now I’ve obtained to place him by way of the ringer of, ‘OK, now you’re going to have to go surfing and fill out these varieties in order that we are able to do that.’”
Because of this and different issues he skilled since his agency made the transfer from TD Ameritrade, Wolter mentioned: “I can let you know the corporate line from Schwab may be very deceptive.”
Schwab executives lately declared the ultimate TD Ameritrade integration weekend — wherein 7,000 advisors with 3.6 million shopper accounts, plus 3.6 million retail shopper accounts, with a complete of $1.3 trillion in belongings — a hit. Certainly, business observers mentioned the transfer went easily general.
However the transition will not be with out its frustrations, advisors mentioned.
“The service staff members are very undertrained and basically learn scripts,” Wolter mentioned.
Wolter mentioned he realized that the variety of service heart calls had possible “exploded” after the transition and that the service heart individuals his agency’s 4 advisors spoke to appeared to have “nice personalities” and had been “attempting to be useful.”
“Nonetheless,” he mentioned, “whenever you name them, it looks as if all they’re doing is actually, I’ll use the time period Googling … by looking out the Schwab system for data as a result of they don’t know what to offer you [as an answer].”
One other downside was his agency was instructed it didn’t have the authority to entry its payment account, “which has cash in it that we use for our operations … paying our workers and whatnot … [But] we hold cash in a financial institution regionally, too, happily.”
It ended up taking two weeks to get entry to these funds, he instructed ThinkAdvisor.
