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 middle staff and lengthy wait occasions.
- Schwab helps companies navigate the modifications, Tom Bradley mentioned.
Mark Wolter’s shopper, newly identified 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 now not in place.
“Impulsively,” 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 received to place him by the ringer of, ‘OK, now you’re going to have to go surfing and fill out these types 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 inform you the corporate line from Schwab could be very deceptive.”
Schwab executives lately declared the ultimate TD Ameritrade integration weekend — during which 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 — successful. Certainly, trade observers mentioned the transfer went easily total.
However the transition just isn’t with out its frustrations, advisors mentioned.
“The service crew members are very undertrained and basically learn scripts,” Wolter mentioned.
Wolter mentioned he realized that the variety of service middle calls had probably “exploded” after the transition and that the service middle folks his agency’s 4 advisors spoke to appeared to have “nice personalities” and had been “attempting to be useful.”
“Nevertheless,” he mentioned, “once you name them, it looks like 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 advised it didn’t have the authority to entry its price 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, thankfully.”
It ended up taking two weeks to get entry to these funds, he advised ThinkAdvisor.