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.

“Impulsively,” after the conversion, “they’re like, ‘you don’t have the correct authorizations to switch funds for this shopper,’” stated Wolter, a accomplice at RIA agency Beacon Wealth Advisors in McHenry, Illinois. “Now I’ve acquired 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 will do that.’”

On account of this and different issues he skilled since his agency made the transfer from TD Ameritrade, Wolter stated: “I can inform you the corporate line from Schwab could be very deceptive.”

Schwab executives just 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 property — successful. Certainly, trade observers stated the transfer went easily total.

However the transition isn’t with out its frustrations, advisors stated.

“The service crew members are very undertrained and basically learn scripts,” Wolter stated.

Wolter stated he realized that the variety of service middle calls had doubtless “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 “making an attempt to be useful.”

“Nevertheless,” he stated, “once you name them, it looks like all they’re doing is basically, I’ll use the time period Googling … by looking the Schwab system for data as a result of they don’t know what to provide you [as an answer].”

One other downside was his agency was instructed it didn’t have the authority to entry its charge account, “which has cash in it that we use for our operations … paying our employees and whatnot … [But] we preserve cash in a financial institution regionally, too, happily.”

It ended up taking two weeks to get entry to these funds, he instructed ThinkAdvisor.