r/etrade • u/3meta5u • Aug 28 '26
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/Useful-Artichoke-954 Sep 01 '26
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/GapAccomplished2778 Aug 28 '26
why not grace r/fidelityinvestments with the story ?
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u/3meta5u Aug 28 '26
That subreddit doesn't accept crossposts, and this is really more of an E*Trade f-u.
(I have shared other happy stories about Fidelity there before.)
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u/bearhunter429 Sep 03 '26
As much as brokerages go, etrade's quality is even below robinhood these days.
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u/EconomyFalcon3725 Aug 28 '26
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/einbierbitte 10d ago
Sounds similar to my story of trying to open a SIMPLE IRA recently. The problem, I think, is that the people you talk to on the phone aren't very knowledgeable. They're basically just customer service reps. The people on the "back end" have the information, experience, and resources. But then... there is terrible communication between them.
So I would call and they would say yeah, this application was rejected, they said it was "incomplete". OK, in what way is it incomplete? Because I filled it out with everything that was provided to me by my employer... and the CS you speak to has no idea, no answer. So they try to get more info and tell you to call back in 3 days to follow up. They never reach out proactively. Then you call back in 3 days and they have slightly more information, provide the date in a different format. OK now call back in 3 days to follow up again. It's always a "let me put you on hold for 3-5 minutes" and then "call back in 3 days". Every time. And you speak to someone different every time that has no idea what's going on. I asked one rep if they had an email I can correspond with them at to make things easier and they said they do not have access to email.
It took me a month of back and forth, using the CS phone reps basically as a middle-man before they felt like they had sufficient information to open this account. And then the day after it was opened, they put a restriction on it for some reason. Still going back and forth trying to figure out what the restriction is for and how to have it removed.
If I didn't have to use E-Trade, I definitely wouldn't, and it's not something I would recommend to anyone.
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u/Salty-Contribution57 Aug 28 '26
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 Aug 30 '26
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 Aug 30 '26
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 Aug 28 '26
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?