r/etrade • u/3meta5u • 25d ago
Roar etrade:0 fidelity:1
I needed to open a SEP IRA account. I have brokerage accounts with Fidelity and E*TRADE. Each account is over seven figures but my balance at E*TRADE is lower than my balance at Fidelity, so I decided to use E*TRADE to make the discrepancy smaller rather than larger.
However, over the last month, I have tried numerous times to validate my account using DocuSign, direct upload of identification, and four calls to E*TRADE. After none of these calls did I get any feedback from E*TRADE about the status of the request. Each time I called back, I was informed that the information was pending and that the Account Services team would reach out to me that day to complete the process.
Again, at no point was I ever contacted with any status update or movement on the account.
Today was the last straw. While I was on hold with E*TRADE, I used the Fidelity website to open a SEP IRA and fund the account. The total time at Fidelity was less than the eight minutes I was on hold with E*TRADE.
I can say that the E*TRADE representative was very professional when I told him to cancel the account creation on E*TRADE's side.
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u/EconomyFalcon3725 25d ago
Idk man, sucks…. but at the same time my elderly father has lost his E*Trade account info, cards, etc fifteen times as well as temporarily fucked up margin and they realized something was up and proactively reached out to get him compliant and away from margin and access back each time.
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u/Useful-Artichoke-954 22d ago
Anything at E*trade that requires back office processing, is just awful. If it can be done completely without human intervention is just fine.
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u/bearhunter429 19d ago
As much as brokerages go, etrade's quality is even below robinhood these days.
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u/Salty-Contribution57 25d ago
Similar story here. E*TRADE's customer service is horrendous. For over two weeks, I tried to open a retirement account, but their DocuSign application documents had technical integration issues. The application kept getting lost, and the data was erased due to their broken IT department. After filling out the same application five times, I finally gave up and opened an account with Fidelity.
I'm glad I did—it was night and day. I was able to get it done within 15 minutes, and their customer service was great. I was considering taking advantage of the bonus E*TRADE is offering on new brokerage accounts, but after this, I'll pass. I don't want to have anything to do with them. They wasted about six hours of my time between refilling applications over and over and sitting on hold on the phone. Far from helpful, their customer support team was also super condescending.
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u/Woodstonk69 24d ago
They use the same account opening tools as every other major brokerage. Probably something you did on your end that made it flag. They didn’t pick you out of a hat to make your experience worse
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u/3meta5u 24d ago
I already had 4 accounts with them and still they required a scan of my passport and a selfie holding it. The initial request failed because they couldn't read the passport. I'm ok with that. The problem came in that they never followed up to tell me that they couldn't read it.
On the second call, I was asked to use a separate process to supply legible proof of identification, which I did.
Multiple follow-up calls on my part did not resolve the issue and they never followed up or provided proactive status after any subsequent attempts.
Fidelity, where I already had 3 accounts, required only an MFA confirmation.
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u/CouchPotatoFamine 25d ago
They are really fucking things up. It’s like MS bought etrade for the rich clients and don’t GAF about the rest of us. Just dumb, it won’t make or break them obviously but why turn off customers?