About - Charles Schwab Corporation

Overall Feedback:

Rash of mysterious terminations of High Net Worth customers, without appeal or recourse. Alarming. Read on.If you're a HNW individual, think very, very carefully about Schwab. My experience has been shockingly bad. Recently Schwab has, for reasons I can only speculate, been banning HNW customers without explanation or recourse. My best guess is that they've been pressured by their banking partner (BNY Mellon) to persecute and evict customers who are associated with fintech operations or cryptocurrency. It happened to me, after being a customer for 30 years. (note: I'm a US national with zero criminal history)At any rate, it's lovely when you get a letter saying, essentially, Schwab reserves the right to terminate you at any time for any reason, and you don't have any recourse, and that they don't owe -- and won't ever give -- an explanation. More than a little traumatizing, especially after thirty years.The good news is that, at least for my style of family office and LLC operations, there are much better options out there. Interactive Brokers, for instance, has great execution, fantastic margin rates, top-tier forex and non-US exchange offerings, and they won't drag you out behind the barn in the dead of night and shoot you in the head. Metaphorically speaking, of course.It's a shame what Schwab has become. If you're just a sleepy little IRA customer, you'll probably be fine. But if you have any kind of sophistication and are involved in any kind of enterprise they can't understand, brace for the worst. Because it's no fun, what happened to me.Schwab reached out with a perfunctory note urging me to "resolve the issue" by calling the main 800 number? Um, really? Can I smirk just a little bit here? Because I spent four months on the phone, several times a week, with the "Client Advocacy Group" (Hey, Bob Tyre. How ya doing?) with zero success. Letters to the Chairman. Character references. Any number of special pleadings. A call to the main Schwab number is going to help me? Are you just trolling and gas-lighting me? This is just the kind of inept, disconnected, incompetent response you've conditioned me to expect -- the only consistent, reliable, predictable feature of this entire misadventure. (8/30/18 I did reach out; after being on hold for ten minutes, and 20 minutes of conversation, the rep told me that in fact there's nothing that Schwab can or will do. The rep said he'd amend the response to this review with a statement stating same. When pigs fly, I assert.)PPS I'm hoping this is Schwab Corporate. With any luck, this report might find its way to somebody with a brain.PPPS An interesting thing crossed my desk this morning: my attorney has another HNW client, also a Schwab customer, who seems to have had a SAR (suspicious activity report) filed against them, which also seems to have resulted in a ban. Said client's own due diligence points to international wire transfers as the cause of Schwab's ban. This overlaps in the cases I have seen first-hand. So, if you're doing any kind of business that involves wiring money outside the US, you may find yourself banned. At any rate, seems like Schwab has some kind of regulatory issue or liability that it is addressing by unjustly terminating customers. Great business model you got there, Chuck. You may think you can stonewall and gaslight your customers, but, newsflash: we all talk to each other. We can connect the dots. We know there's something going on. Fix it before your reputation is irreparably damaged.PPPPS Chuck, if you're listening, consider that you're shafting a member of your immediate community. Remember that golf retreat you purchased on Padre Lane? You bought it from my my best friend's parents -- I grew up in that house. You probably knew that "Bertie" lived close by -- who was, and remains, a dear family friend. You listening, Chuck? Because (metaphorically) knifing people in your immediate community is not good business.