There is "tremendous progress" being made with the integration of Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade, and the companies are "aggressively" hiring advisor service staff to keep up with the heavy trading volumes seen in recent months, according to Tom Bradley, a senior vice president at Schwab and head of TD Ameritrade integration.
The combined company has eliminated 1,200 jobs since Schwab announced the finalization of its acquisition of TD Ameritrade on Oct. 6. The job cuts were part of "our continuing efforts to reduce overlapping or redundant roles across the two firms," according to Schwab.
However, "there have been zero layoffs on the service side" of the advisor custody business, Bradley said Tuesday during a conference call with reporters.
The additional staff that Schwab has hired helped Schwab Advisor Services to "dramatically improve the wait times" that some clients had experienced and complained about a few months back, he said in response to a ThinkAdvisor question.
"We're much closer to the levels that we believe our clients deserve," he said, explaining that the company experienced heavy trading volumes that "we didn't anticipate" at the end of 2020 and the start of 2021. Although peaks and valleys happen often in the sector, the peaks tend to "come out of nowhere," he noted.
But "we were able to adjust very quickly and we're very happy that our service experience is back closer to normal levels — at least normal for tax season" when there tend to be higher volumes, he pointed out.
Last year, "service delivery to clients was uneven at best and disappointing to us as well as clients at times across the company," Walt Bettinger, Schwab CEO and president, said during the firm's Winter Business Update webcast earlier this year. "Frankly, the volumes overwhelmed even our most aggressive projections," he said at the time.
"We have definitely seen stabilization and improvement on what we experienced late last year" across the company, Schwab spokesman Rob Farmer told ThinkAdvisor on Tuesday.
Integration Update
"We're in a phase right now where essentially all the work is on our side [and] it's primarily business as usual for independent investment advisors," Bradley told reporters. "We're keeping our finger on the pulse of the advisors in a variety of ways."
For example, Schwab surveyed TD Ameritrade advisors and received about 1,600 responses. The advisors' "feedback has been very consistent since we announced the deal" to merge the companies, Bradley said.
"They have really three top concerns," he noted: "Will there be any repapering of my client accounts, number one. Number two, what will the end technology platform be or look like? And number three, do I get to keep my service team?"
Schwab's objectives remain "to make this conversion as seamless as possible for independent advisors and their clients, and we intend to take these two great companies and… combine them to make something that is even better," he said.
So far, it does not look as if new signatures on any documents are required to switch clients over to Schwab from TD Ameritrade. "For the most part, it looks like we're in the no-repapering zone, which advisors are quite pleased with," Bradley said.
