I am with IBIE, and I sent a USD deposit to my IB account from my US bank two weeks ago, but the cash hasn't been credited to my IB account yet. IB's help phone numbers connect me to the utterly useless customer service center in India, whose reps are mostly clueless and keep giving me the runaround. The ticket I opened via the secure messaging center has gone unanswered. It's been infuriating, and I'm truly running out of patience. I've been with IB for 20 years, and the very few problems I had over the years were always dealt with quickly and efficiently by their US-based customer service reps. Does anyone happen to know if there's a way to contact IB's Funding and Banking team in Chicago directly, without going through the Indian customer service center, so that I can finally get this sorted by a competent person? Many thanks in advance.
I sent 1.8 to IBKR earlier in the year via wire and was credited within the hour, but it took them 17 days to permission me for vol-trading (PM, full option trading). On day 14 I wired out. Day 17 I was allowed to trade vol, but the account was at $0.00 by the time they got around to allowing me to trade. I've been an IB client since 1998. TL;DR -> there is no limit to IBKR's incompetence.
%% US bank wire to US broker is done in less than 1 day, even though it may not credit the same day if done late in the day. FEDX = 2 days, US post office about 5 days+/, even for certified funds. Have you tried chat; IBKR usually solved my problem before US reps answered the phone[Im in US]ON bank wiresto US bokerage/ the sending bank can tell you if it was recieved
Have you tried contacting your own bank to see where the money has gone? It's strange that a deposit would take 2 weeks to be credited in the trading account.
Just to clarify, before my account was transferred from IB UK to IBIE, I had the option of Bill Pay (free), ACH (free) and wire transfers ($25 fee at origin) for USD cash deposits. I never had any problems having my cash credited, ever. Following the forced move from IB UK to IBIE, thanks to fekking Brexit, only the wire option was available for USD deposits, and that costs $25 a pop at the point of origin. A few months ago IB added ACH, which is free, but they put a 4-day hold on the cash before it's made available for trading. That 4-day hold is supposed to be in place just for the first ACH transfer (for security reasons), but they never lifted it after my first ACH transaction with IBIE, as they're so damn incompetent, so each time you make an ACH deposit you still must wait 4 biz days to have access to your cash. The fact that I was with IB LLC, then IB UK, and made ACH transfers from/to those accounts for 20 years clearly doesn't count for anything as far as their security concerns go. A month ago or so they added the Request-For-Pay (RFP) option with from JP Morgan Chase (this https://www.reuters.com/business/fi...es-new-real-time-payments-service-2021-08-10/). Basically it works like Bill Pay, but better, as payments are supposed to be credited in real time rather than the next day. The way it works is, you send a request for a deposit from your IB account to you IB-linked/verified JPM Chase checking account, which I have. You confirm the payment in your Chase mobile app or on the Chase website, then the payment is sent from Chase, and in theory it should be credited to your IB account immediately. In my case the payment was never credited. I called IB's US 800 number, and the Indian reps who keep answering the funding line don't even know what RFP from Chase is, which I found astonishing, so I keep getting transferred to other Indian reps until one knows what RFP is, then this person claims to have raised the issue with their "funding and banking" team. And then nothing happens, you just keep waiting and your cash is still missing. It's incredibly frustrating because all that's needed is for someone in the US to manually verify in IB's Chase account for RFP transfers the transaction coming from my Chase checking account, whose number they have, and credit the money. It would take a competent person three minutes to do that. Years ago when I called IB's 800 number I was immediately put through to a capable person in Chicago who immediately solved the issue, currently you must deal with these guys in Delhi or Mumbai who don't even know what you're talking about half of the time, if you can even understand them as their English is so bad. Effing unbelievable.
Maybe you can start the tracing from the JPM Chase side to make sure first that they did indeed send the money and sent it correctly to IB and go from there. There is an IB rep here named @def. You can send him/her a PM about your issue to see if there is something that he/she can do. Personally competency issue aside, I find this is highly disturbing and irresponsible of IB to have outsourced the operation that deals with our most private and personal information to a country where a majority of scams and frauds originate. It's only a matter of time there is going to be a security breach where all of our personal identities are going to be stolen. Oh well, it's IB.
The money did leave my Chase account, it was transferred to an IB account with Chase whose last four digits appear in my records, and I have a Chase reference number for the transaction, which I provided to IB. I agree with everything you said, this is all extremely worrying. Mind you, this is about a fairly small amount of money, but I dread the thought of a five- or six-figure sum vanishing into thin air just like that, and not having the option of speaking to a competent customer service rep capable of resolving the issue speedily. It's absolutely unacceptable, and I will start looking into other brokers asap.