Schwab sets date to transition advisers, clients and assets from TD Ameritrade

Charles Schwab Corp. has officially set the date for when financial advisers will transfer off the TD Ameritrade brokerage platform and onto Schwab Advisor Services.

The transition will occur over Labor Day weekend in 2023, said Tom Bradley, a managing director with Schwab. On Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2023, all financial advisers who still have data with TD will come to work to find all of their client accounts and data transferred and available within Schwab.

Bradley also reiterated his promise to advisers that there will be no repapering of clients and that most firms will be able to keep their service teams.

Changes will be “few and far between,” he said.

Advisers and clients who log in to TD will be met with a page informing them of the change, Bradley told reporters Thursday. Historical account statements and reports will all be available, he said.

Schwab plans to eventually retire the TDA brand entirely but hasn’t yet set a specific date.  

Bradley acknowledged that Schwab still has plenty of preparation and training to do to get registered investment advisers and their staff up to speed. The hope is Labor Day avoids other typically busy times for the wealth management industry.

“We didn’t want the extra work to fall on advisers during tax season,” Bradley said. “Most of the planning is done; it’s all about execution now.”

The announcement comes a little over two years after Schwab officially closed its acquisition of TD Ameritrade. Behind the scenes, the company is already operating as one business, said Jessica Heffron, a managing director at Schwab.

The work is underway now to ensure that systems will be able to support the massive influx of new volume coming to Schwab’s brokerage next September, Heffron said.

“Our goal is to support advisers through this as much as possible,” she said. “We know it’s a big exercise in change management for them.”

The company is also simulating the migration of data from TD to Schwab and will continue to do so to ensure that all systems are a go. Advisers will soon get credentials to see how their data from TD will be rendered on Schwab in a preview mode, but until Labor Day weekend they can continue to run their businesses on TD Ameritrade.

“We know that for an event of this size and what it means for [advisers], we always have to be transparent and communicate as early and as often as possible,” Heffron said.

[More: Schwab exec updates progress on integrating TD Ameritrade technology]