The final piece to the integration of Schwab and TD Ameritrade—the great client data migration—will take place Labor Day weekend 2023, Schwab officials said today.
Two key forces behind the integration, managing directors of advisor services Tom Bradley and Jessica Heffron, explained the process and answered questions at an online press conference—and perhaps delivered some good news that has been top of mind for the roughly 6,000 independent advisors who potentially might be enduring the migration.
“Is there going to be any repapering? The short answer is no, there is no repapering,” Bradley said, addressing concerns that a deluge of client paperwork would bog down advisors’ offices for months to come. “I’ve been through many of these integrations. We have a way to do these integrations in a paperless fashion, essentially through a negative consent letter.”
The platform will remain Schwab Advisor Center, but the IT team is replicating popular and important functions from Veo, as well as keeping iRebal and Thinkpipes, he said.
“And a big question that we haven’t directly answered but will now, ‘Do I get to keep my service team?’ For most advisors, you will be able to keep your person or your service team,” Bradley said. “There will be a few instances where we have to make some changes, but these will be few and far between.”
With Labor Day weekend as the data migration date, Schwab is teeing up a program of instilling confidence in the TD Ameritrade advisors who will make the switch, including hiring and training “hundreds and hundreds” of IT workers to assist, he said.
“We continue to invest millions of dollars into our platform,” Bradley said. “We’re surge staffing in preparation for what we anticipate will be more calls around these conversions. We’re hiring staff now because we want them to have some experience and be well-trained prior to that weekend.”
According to Heffron, there are a lot of pieces that need to come together to support the merger, including scaling the Schwab systems to be able to handle the new volume of activity.
“A huge part of this conversion is the data, converting the data from the TDA system to the Schwab broker-dealer systems. A lot of our time has been spent working with the data, validating the data and doing some simulated moves of that data,” Heffron said. “We’ll continue to do that into 2023 to build that confidence for the big event.”
Since the merger was announced two years ago, Schwab has tried to bring the TD Ameritrade advisors into the process, to more or less success. For example, earlier this year Schwab launched Jumpstart, a program to let TD advisors open new accounts on the Schwab platform.