Switching online brokers is a time-consuming process; I just lived through moving from QTrade to Questrade to take advantage of Questrade’s 3% cash-back promotion. I covered the basic steps you need to take to switch brokers here. It took even longer than I expected, and here I break down some of the reasons it took as long as it did¹.

Form filling was error-prone

The Questrade process to request a transfer looks something like this:

1. You navigate to the Questrade account that is going to get the transfer (e.g. your TFSA)
2. You initiate the transfer request by hitting a link. This, behind the scenes, creates a formal Transfer Request ticket that is processed by the front and back office.
3. You are asked a series of questions online (sending broker, account numbers, kind of transfer)
4. A pdf is automatically created² that you then have to print, sign, and then…
5. Upload.

The first problem was unique to the dying days of the promotion as me and every other person on the planet was trying to complete the same steps. Step 5 sometimes did not work, and you were left with a generic error message which encouraged you to try, try, again. Which I dutifully did. Unfortunately, this meant there was an explosion in the number of Transfer Request tickets that I mentioned in step 2, which I am sure completely overwhelmed the humans on the other side of the ticket.

The second problem was a bit more subtle. Sometimes, it seemed that the answers provided in step 3 were not populated on the resultant pdf. And hence, in some cases, forms were submitted with some mandatory fields missing. This would have been prevented had I bothered to carefully review the pdfs from step 4, but when you’re asking for a dozen different account transfers, it’s easy to miss a radio button that’s not filled out.

This problem was particularly noticeable on the RESP transfer forms, which are different from all of the others since there is a CRA form that also needs to be filled out. I believe I attempted to fill out the form correctly 3 times before getting it right. Rejection of an incorrectly filled form takes DAYS to process so timelines rapidly extend.

There’s not a lot of transparency in transfer progress

It took me a while to figure out where the transfer requests are hidden on the Questrade portal (you have to go to Move Money: Move Money History: Transfer: Transfer account to Questrade history)³ and here you see one of three states: Transfer Complete, Transfer in Progress, Action Required. There’s no detail beyond that.

• “Action Required” is code for “call us, there’s a problem”; the old broker probably rejected the transfer for some reason. One reason is specific to RRIFs, but I covered that previously.
• “Transfer in Progress” means one of:
  • Your filled out your transfer form correctly
  • We are initiating the request to your old broker
  • Your old broker is working on the request
  • Your old broker has accepted the request, but we don’t have it yet

Questrade also helpfully provides automated emails indicating when the Transfer starts and is nearing completion (they have your stuff, it’s just not showing up in the system yet), but — and this is a major irritant — the automated emails don’t include what account is being discussed. When you’re moving as many accounts as I did, this is not much better than noise.

One other small clue I had that my old provider got the request from Questrade is that they were usually pretty fast to charge their $150 transfer-out fee, plus HST⁴. So when I saw that I knew that my old provider was the one holding up the process…and if I didn’t see a transfer-out fee, I could safely assume that Questrade was to blame.

Did I say it was done? Well, almost…

I noted in a few cases that not 100% of the funds moved to Questrade. Unfortunately, the timing of the transfers meant that the likelihood of a quarterly dividend payout overlapping with the process was high. And yes, I see some residual cash left in my old broker in some cases for this reason. I suppose i’ll have to chase that down at some point, but the vast majority of stuff is now taken care of…well, except for my Canadian dollar RRIF, which is going to stay with QTrade a little longer until more of my mandatory RRIF payments have been made.

1. My TFSA was the fastest, with the transfer request being accepted on February 26 and the holdings showing up on March 21. The joint investment account was the last to be processed, with holdings showing up in my Questrade account on April 15. ↩︎
2. Whether a pdf is created or not I think is partially dependent on who the sending institution is. Not sure about that. ↩︎
3. And although I show this as a menu structure, it’s not really. Move Money is a menu, but Move Money History is included on the page about halfway down. I’m not a big fan of how Questrade structures their web experience; it’s useable but it took a while to figure out where to find things and then remember where those things were… ↩︎
4. Covered by Questrade, except for the HST part. But that’s another document submission to prove that the old provider charged the transfer out fee. Which is a bit ridiculous since ALL providers do this. ↩︎