What’s Going on With Transition from TD Ameritrade to Schwab?
We ask ourselves this question nearly every day so some of you are probably ready for an update too.
As a reminder, in 2019 Schwab announced that it was acquiring TD Ameritrade. The deal actually closed in October 2020 with the implementation timeline expected to be 30 to 36 months from that point. As you may remember, the news at that time was that both companies would continue to operate as largely separate entities until the transition was complete. Schwab is now confirming that the actual conversion is expected to be on schedule – sometime between April and September 2023.
What have we experienced so far?
Both Schwab and Ameritrade realize how complicated this transition is – for them, for us and for you. They are committed to minimizing the disruption for all of us while delivering a customer experience and platform which is better than what we have now. Both companies are committed to getting the conversion right the first time – for advisors and for clients. All good to hear. Thus far, we see great commitment, communication, and lots of testing, but we recognize the heavy lifting ahead.
As many of you know, we signed up for the Schwab “jumpstart” program which allows TD Ameritrade advisors an opportunity to get an earlier look at and experience using the Schwab platform. We did this so we will not be on our Day 1 while you are on your Day 1! We moved a handful of our personal accounts (lots of paperwork to do!), absorbed a few onboarding sessions and then jumped into “learning by doing.” See attached photo of Marci “learning by doing.” You will be happy to know to know that at least so far, we haven’t messed anything up badly enough that we couldn’t undo and redo – although there has been a fair amount of undoing and redoing. Not a problem.
There are a few things we have already seen which we really like:
The client interface (called Schwab Alliance) which will replace TD Advisor Client is easy to use and the mobile experience is much improved. The security has been upgraded and some features which were not available on TD Ameritrade’s mobile platform will be available on Schwab’s. That’s good.
Schwab doesn’t allow DocuSign as much as TDA does (not sure THAT is such a bad thing) but they do have an electronic signature process via Schwab Alliance which is easy to use and doesn’t require clients to remember the car they owned in 1967. This is good too!
The phone support has been excellent – and we have needed it.
What have we been told will happen, but we have not seen yet?
There will be no need for any paperwork for account transfer from TD Ameritrade to Schwab unless accounts are moved before the official transition date. Spoiler alert – we will want to continue to build our Schwab experience in the next year so we will want to move some additional client accounts but we will do the paperwork as usual so you will not have to do. Let us know if you want to be early adopter.
Existing account and advisor authorizations which are on the Ameritrade platform (trading authorization, fee deductions, option trading, electronic statement delivery, etc) will be carried over to Schwab.
Most account history will be transferred over. We also have all of your LFS quarterly updates since you joined our LFS family.
Some of the beneficiary info will have to be updated after the transfer.
There are likely hundreds of questions we haven’t even though of yet!
What do we need to do with you over the next 9 to 15 months? We will take the lead here!
Data clean-up. Since most information will be directly transferred, we can all help by ensuring that what we transfer is up to date. That includes mailing and email addresses, phone numbers etc. We will also want to close any account which are not funded. We can always re-open those at Schwab if they are needed.
Where possible, we want to update any automatic transfer instructions between your Ameritrade accounts and your checking account to “pull” from Ameritrade rather than “push” from Bank of America (for example). These transfer instructions will then automatically migrate to Schwab. If that can’t happen, it’s fine – we will just have to redo those after the conversion with your new Schwab account info.
We have been told that this transition will be much easier if clients have an active Advisor Client account at Ameritrade. We know that some of you do not use Advisor Client but for those of you that do, we will want to ensure that your access is up to date.
Let us know what questions you have so far! We have time to get this work done with you way ahead of the actual transition.
